


Love Will Tear Us Apart Again

by VoluptuousPanic



Category: Babylon Berlin (TV)
Genre: Angst, Berlin (City), Breakups, Cutting Losses, Drugs, F/M, Infidelity, It'll End in Tears - Freeform, Plot? What Plot?, Sexy Eye Bags, Weimar Republic Obsessions, nightclubbing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-07
Updated: 2019-07-07
Packaged: 2020-06-23 21:34:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19709887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VoluptuousPanic/pseuds/VoluptuousPanic
Summary: "Until Charlotte.Jeder einmal in Berlin," Helga whispered, touching her lips. She wiped her eyes on the back of her hand. "And what are you to her?"





	Love Will Tear Us Apart Again

"She's had you." Helga's voice, like her resignation, was matter of fact. The ruffles of her white nightdress and bed jacket hid her shape. Soft white, cotton lawn on cutwork lace. Her tear-stained face flushed red down to her breasts.

Gereon hauled himself out from under the bedclothes to sit on the edge of the bed, his bare feet on the rug, elbows on his knees. She was right. Charlotte had had him, thoroughly, more than once. Just as he'd had her. "I needed...something," he mumbled stupidly. He didn't know what else to say. 

Gereon turned to look at Helga again, over his shoulder, and watched her dab at her eyes with a floral handkerchief already sodden with tears and snot. He hated it when she cried. It used to break his heart. Now it made him angry. He let the feeling rise into his chest and turned to face the dark window again. It was a knot round his heart and in his throat. Helga was ugly when she cried, and the white cloud of her nightclothes and the bed linens and her red face brought to mind a hen with crimson comb and wattle. He punched his own thigh, wincing at the smack of his knuckles into flesh. It was as much to will away his growing resentment and new revulsion as it was to keep the other thoughts at bay. 

"She's had you," she whispered, then collected herself. He could hear her effort to speak clearly through the tears. "I knew this would come. A woman has a certain degree of expectation that once she’s a wife there will be others, but I didn’t expect it to hurt so much when it happened again." 

"We aren't married. We never were," Gereon whispered, but he knew Helga could hear him. He felt her turn onto her side to face his back, the bed quaking rhythmically as she sobbed until she gagged. He wanted to retch himself, and slid down to the floor, head between his pajamaed knees and arms over his head. He didn't know what he felt, other than shame. The guilt was the same as always, centered around Anno, Moritz, obligation, familial duty. There was no desire, and what desire there had been, he knew now was a muted thing woven together from mutual adolescent infatuation, longing, grief, and opportunity. Their love was a shared idea, a shared secret, a litany of somedays conducted clandestinely behind closed doors. Until Helga came to Berlin, he'd never once taken her anywhere, met her, escorted her as anyone but her brother-in-law. Outside of her bedroom that he crept into at night, or stolen moments in dark rooms and hallways, she'd never once been anyone but his brother's widow. Their love was an abstract that had never matured, their carryings on virtually unchanged since the years when they were childhood sweethearts, unrequited, since a virginal coquette had played brother against brother, always choosing Anno if there was a choice to be observed by others, choosing Gereon were it to remain a secret. The love Helga wanted was a fairytale, to be protected, cherished, cloistered. Eine hausfrau. They had never talked about the practicalities of marriage, how she was ill suited for anything but being the wife of a doctor, like Anno would have been, or a lawyer, a politician, a man who needed a specific kind of home kept and managed, who would be the kind of provider and protector Gereon would never be. Gereon was a police officer. And until Berlin he had remained in his father’s house to be close to his brother’s wife, hiding their relationship from both his father and her child who would soon be old enough for secrets of his own. They hid from family and family friends, from Helga's friends and other suitable women who he courted disingenuously but never made promises to or bedded. He was thirty, shellshocked, and ashamed that he’d spent a decade playing house with Helga.

He thought of Helga's awkwardness the night he found her waiting at Nassen Dreieck, sitting primly and stiffly at the bar, like she didn't want to touch anything. She rubbed at her glass with her handkerchief before she took her shot of the cheap schnapps that burned like fire. They danced together, awkwardly, and he was already angry then about how resistant she was to anything but a waltz or foxtrot, but passed it off on his having had too much to drink. The same way he'd passed off his resentment at the way she still undressed in the dark, as furtive in the Wolters’ house as she was in Köln. Freely alone together for the first time, and they were still coming together half-clothed, he opening his flies, she rucking up her nightdress or skirt. Coming together. Had he ever made Helga feel anything like what it was evident Charlotte could reach with him? 

Gereon couldn't fight the thoughts anymore, the surge of feelings and images of being with Charlotte. Her laugh, the way she spoke to him conspiratorially. First dancing together, not quite innocently, while working. Then a spontaneous kiss. Later less spontaneous kisses, his hand up her dress, but shy of touching her, at Tausend as they stared into each other's eyes, unspeakably high, her hands cupping his face. Innocent until the night that she'd gone down onto her knees on the office floor, seeing to him then and there in a way he'd never had dared to imagine. He'd returned the favor with less skill, though no less enthusiasm, Charlotte splayed on his desk and gripping his hair with both hands. She made him wait for more. For weeks, she'd primly put him off, gently pushing at his chest when he came too close, or giving a ghost of a touch to his cheek, turning her face away from a kiss with a demure smile the night he took her out for a chaste slow foxtrot at the Schwankes Festsäle in Chausseestraße. It was something different than rejection, because it felt good, sometimes making him half giddy, and he followed her lead as easily as she followed his. 

_Charlotte appeared in his office again in the small hours to deliver a file at the end of a day that had left them all the worse for wear. She was ready to leave, already in her coat and hat, but slumped down into the chair opposite him. Charlotte was tired, exhausted even. He watched her light a cigarette that she took from the packet that lay on his desk. He was exhausted too, and had stopped hoping for more than taking her dancing, but found himself asking if she had plans for the evening, as it was early yet for her and neither of them were on the rota for tomorrow._

“Swear to me I was the only one until her.” Helga’s demand brought Gereon back to the here and now.

He raised his head and looked at the wall, but couldn't bear to turn to Helga who knelt on the bed behind him. “The only one that mattered,” he muttered. Elizabeth Behnke’s Wilhelmine modesty so like Helga’s, half clothed, wholesomely mechanical. He felt a pang of regret and embarrassment at how forgettable it had been—he had indeed forgotten—and how something so fleeting and unsensual had broken Elizabeth's heart. What mediocrity had women learned to hang their lives around? He’d been no more than a willing body with an itch to scratch and had put in so little effort.

_"Gereon Rath, I would like nothing more than for you to take me home and fuck me until I have wrung you dry," Charlotte responded. There was no coyness in her statement. He coughed with a clumsy inhale from his cigarette and his cock was hard in his trousers. Wordlessly he complied with Charlotte's request, nearly dragging her out by the hand through the dark hallways of the Castle. He drove her home to her new and comfortable but spartan rooms in Spenerstraße to be wrung as thoroughly as promised. It started in the kitchen where they shared a meager dinner of a single apple and hard cheese, a jam glass of Kirschwasser. He set Charlotte on the table, standing between her open legs, and kissed her the way he would if she were his, and found that she responded with a tenderness she hadn’t offered before._

Helga sniffled and sighed. “Until her?” Her voice was resigned again. He’d known her long enough to know it was clear she thought he was lying, but being truthful about Elizabeth would hurt her even more than being truthful about Charlotte.

_“You’re beautiful,” Charlotte said gently once she’d gotten him undressed._

_He felt his face flush with whatever was left that hadn’t already raced to his cock the minute Charlotte had stated her intentions. “Not as beautiful as you.” He let himself look at her, really look at her face and mussed hair, her slender limbs and narrow hips, the scant handfuls of her breasts, the dark triangle of hair at the apex of her thighs. That he’d had his face there but hadn’t been able to stop and simply look at all of her had him agog. Charlotte came to him then. She kissed his lips softly. She touched his cheek and he closed his eyes, turning his face into her palm. She touched his chest, pinched a nipple, traced ribs and crest of hip and curve of backside, touched the fuzz on his belly, then gripped his cock to gently steer him to her bed._

“Until her,” he admitted. He didn’t even have to will it to be true. There had been only Helga until Berlin. There would have been more had he taken the opportunity or used his position or put forth a few marks, which he’d gamely considered. Berlin was a veritable buffet of women and girls of all descriptions catering to all tastes and depravities. But there was little point in indulging when there was Charlotte, who’d seen the whole of him, his best and worst and weakest and most underhanded and most pathetic, before she’d made her choice to simply want him as he was. To accept his mediocrity as it was. He laughed to himself bitterly, his body wracked with a silent sob that he prayed wouldn’t escalate to a tremor because it would lead to being touched, give Helga purpose. He hid his face in his hands and was surprised to find tears. 

_He remembered the sound of their flesh meeting, the slow, steady smack of the long ride he wanted to give Charlotte, the smiles of genuine pleasure and words and laughter that came naturally. How his fingertips dug into her hips and her small breasts jiggled with each thrust. He remembered how intently she watched him, almost mildly triumphant, as he raptly watched his own cock slide in and out of her, how wet she was, and the unashamed way she touched herself, touched him where their bodies joined. And how she took his hand to pull him down into her arms so their bodies became one. She whispered "Gereon, you can come now." He did, pouring himself into her, failing to pull out as he had always had before with Helga regardless of the calendar she kept. He had no idea how Charlotte took care, and in the moment he didn't, for the way she held him and whispered "don't stop" as if he could do anything but. He kept going for her, coming back for seconds after a long bout of hungry, deep kisses that led rather naturally to the mythical soixante-neuf. The third time, he couldn't finish, but what they were doing to each other was past art or skill. They were drunk on each other, quaking with sensation as she rode him a final time. "I can't," he panted, not unhappily, and gently stopped her, his hands on her thighs. She rose off of him and he shuddered, spent. Charlotte kissed his forehead, then lay beside him. "Wrung dry," she whispered, her fingers on his open lips. All he could do was smile stupidly and nod, eyes closed against morning light. They woke in the early afternoon and spent a long while looking at one another, saying little. They made love again, or rutted, depending on which parts of the encounter he examined. Then he dressed again without washing and went home to Helga, smelling of sweat and Charlotte._

Gereon was surprised at Helga’s plea as well: “End it,” she said. “We can marry. We can have children.” She sounded like a young girl. She often did. As if a wedding or an afternoon in the registry office would set to right something that had been wrong from the beginning. As if their liaison would be fêted. 

“Anno isn’t dead," Gereon said. Though he knew, had seen Anno, in dissociative fits and in the cool sterility of an examination room that adjoined a walnut paneled office, saying the words out loud to Helga was a punch to the guts that added to the knot that bound his heart and throat. Anno's presence, a mere telephone call or calling card away, remained a live wire of pain that left all Gereon's failings exposed. Anno, whose clinical detachment and solicitous attention alternated dizzyingly, sustaining Gereon’s confusion and grief. Anno, pleading with Gereon to come under his care while speaking frankly about the side effects of experimental treatment methods more devastating than the general debilitation of shellshock. Gereon would have no part in it, though Anno’s interest in morphine and barbiturate therapy was also distressingly keen. Anno, who hadn’t asked after Helga or Moritz beyond their welfare and an indication that certain arrangements had already manipulated her widow’s pension and ensured it would never stop, provided she didn’t remarry. Anno, still asserting dominance and control to keep Gereon in his place. Forever the little brother. Forever inadequate. Forever snatching at crumbs.

"The Anno we knew is," Helga whispered, then her tone brightened. "Herr Nyssen has arranged the documents."

Gereon laughed again. He could hear his own unkindness in the face of Helga's misplaced hope, her faith that all would be organized for her and done on her behalf. He wondered for a moment if she'd ever not been given exactly what she wanted, if she'd ever been denied anything but Anno’s return from the front. Gereon certainly had denied her nothing. Until Berlin. He looked at his hands, his bitten nails and the nicotine stains on his fingers, the tracks of morphine injections on the pale flesh of his arms. The pale blue of his pajamas. His pale feet on the rug. He had become a creature of the night. "The Gereon you knew is dead too," he said. 

_Charlotte in his arms and straddling his hips on a velveteen banquette at Teufelskopf where they'd come to dance, just as everyone else had. "Let me take you home," he said, too loud in her ear over the band, his hands on her waist as he fought the urge to grind against her. Charlotte kissed him sweetly. "Birte's home. Let's get a room. I know a place."_

_Charlotte in his arms and straddling his hips on clean white sheets in a small, well-appointed hotel that let rooms by the hour as well as the night. He knew not to ask, and didn't care. She was here with him now, almost lazily riding his cock, drawing pleasure out of him in slow, fluid strokes. He held his open palm below her belly so that the pad of his thumb rode against the firm little rosebud of flesh in the bright, wet pink between her legs with each rise and fall of her hips. She'd taken his hand their first time together and placed it there, the same as she'd guided him beyond the rudiments he knew and taught him when to use his tongue, when to suck, when to touch. But for now, he was enjoying using his cock and Charlotte’s back began arching in a way that told him he should do nothing but let her take what she needed._

_“Fühlt sich gut an?" he asked in a whisper and received a slow nod and sly smile in response. Charlotte’s eyes were closed._

Gereon sighed aloud in frustration and to gather himself. He passed his hand over the flies of his pajamas, willing the erection that had risen to subside. He stood shakily and leaned against the window casing to look out into the dark hof, his back to Helga, though he could see her reflection in the window pane. How she was perched on the bed, slowly rocking herself as she always did when she cried, just as she had when they were children. She fiddled with the lace of her bed jacket and had torn the girlish ribbon loose from her long hair. He was fed up and weary. 

"There have been more than you," Helga said then. Her tone as cruel as his had been, her face hardening, eyes flashing. "You know she’s had more. New women, like her, who go about on their own...girls, like her, are common whores, Gereon. You know there are others, and it's unseemly, Gereon, for you to be with her. It will matter to your father." 

"My father can hang himself," he said dispassionately. 

"And Moritz?"

Gereon turned to her at last. "Moritz isn’t my son, Helga. And you are not my wife." In the space where he believed he should feel a rending, something stretched too far and broken, he felt nothing. As if his insides had been picked clean, or all the passion that he'd ever felt for Helga had been burned away, used up or dampened too many times to catch fire again. It was a feeling that he'd been aware of for longer than he cared to admit. 

Helga's face crumpled with a fresh wave of fat tears that rolled down her cheeks. These came with anger. "Swear to me! Swear to me you loved me! That there’s been no one else you've loved. I need to know you loved me."

Gereon felt the pull of Helga's display, how he was to be reeled in again to comfort her, to set things to rights, make promises anew and shed tears of his own. "I can’t," he said, the lump rising. He turned to the window again, squeezed his throat until it hurt, then twisted his fist into the front of his vest, suddenly lucid. A light had come on in the flat across the hof and the man who lived there was reading with his dog. Gereon envied him. How simple it must be to be a man with a dog. "What difference does it make when it ends? I was a boy. I wanted you because Anno had you. And you wanted to be wanted. Being wanted sometimes feels like love." 

"So she wants you?" 

_"Fuck me," Charlotte whispered, her command coming over him like an electric shock. She reached back blindly for his hand and guided it around her body and between her legs. He kissed the back of her neck and held her hip tighter with the hand that wasn't busy. "As hard as you want." He was close already, and this nearly undid him. He complied, and her bed rattled with the motion, scooting across the floor._

_"Do you like it when I do this?" Charlotte asked, on her knees on the rug beside her bed. He nodded, unable to find words as he watched her pull at the flies of his tweed trousers, unfastening all the buttons in one motion. She pushed his shirt and vest up his belly. The buttons of his unders were a slower affair and he helped her, his cock springing free against her cheek. Like the first time, he gasped at the heat of her mouth._

_"Softer," Charlotte said with what was almost a giggle as she ran her hand through his hair. He opened his eyes to look up at her, attempting to divide his attention between how beautiful she was, what his tongue was doing, her heady scent, the last aldehydic shimmer of her perfume, salt. She was smiling sweetly, her teeth sliding over her lower lip as she gently pulled at this hair and subtly repositioned her body to have him where she wanted him. "You're an older man," she flirted. "You should be better at this. It's a good thing you can follow instructions, Herr Kommissar." From another woman, it would be belittlement. From Charlotte, it was something else, and he nearly smiled between her legs. He did everything she asked and more, surprising her with a greedy lick with the flat of his tongue. She arched with a soft cry._

"I don’t know what Charlotte wants," Gereon admitted. "I don't know what I want." That was an admission too. For now, he was content with what was becoming so distinct a pattern it felt like courting: taking Charlotte dancing, taking her out for a drink that could as easily turn into something more or endless cups of coffee and conversation at an Aschinger, taking her home to Moabit, avoiding going home to Helga. All punctuated by unfailingly proper behavior in the workplace—after the initial wholly improper aberration—that seemed to inconvenience neither of them. He and Charlotte had never discussed any particulars and envisioning a trajectory was pointless. Gereon knew far too well how to construct a future within the confines of his head. "I don't want this," he said.

"You don’t want me. Or Moritz. We need you. And you need a proper wife and children. Not some...some...snapper." 

The word gutted him. 

In the reflection on the window, Gereon watched Helga stand, the bed a gulf between them. She wiped her eyes on the cuff of her bed jacket and retied the ribbon in her hair. In memory, he could feel the smoothness of her hair, the sensation of curling its length around his fingers, so different than Charlotte's loose messy curls, the naked nape of Charlotte's neck shorn as close as his own. Helga turned her back to him and covered her face with her hands. She sighed and wiped her eyes again and looked in the mirror. She patted her cheeks and neck as if to confirm that she was still attractive. She was as pretty as ever, but her heart-shaped face, wide blue eyes, soft skin and plump body no longer touched him. She was his brother's wife. 

_Fear that he could smell on his own skin. Mud. The brackish taste of lake water and deafening boom of artillery. Charlotte's cold dead lips under his, losing her under the water, behind the barbed wire, into the water that flooded the trench. He shook with it, but made himself come up to crawl across the earth and slip into the water calling Charlotte's name. Charlotte answered, her voice soft and sure as he swam deeper and deeper, then was pulled back to the surface that broke over his head into a small room golden with lamplight._

_Charlotte was naked beside him with his kit, pulling the leather tourniquet tight to raise a vein, her face worried, eyes liquid. She patted his cheek impatiently, but spoke with gentleness, just as she had the first time at the Castle. "Gereon, I don't know what to do. You have to help me." He summoned the energy to fight the tremors, pull the leather tighter, smack the bend of his elbow. "One, or two?" she asked of the ampoules. He heard himself answer that this was different and only half was necessary, and watched Charlotte draw the morphine into the syringe. He shakily fitted needle to vein, then welcomed the edge of oblivion as she loosened the leather strip that bound his arm. "Thank you," he whispered._

_"You were dreaming, but it’s as if it were real. That you were there again.” Charlotte's voice came with wonder and dread. Charlotte who had passed off drowning, dying, like a minor inconvenience. It would have killed him. "That's where you go, isn't it?"_

_He nodded. His limbs were slick with sweat, his hair wet, wetting Charlotte's cool, dry skin. He fought to get closer and pressed his face into her breasts as she pulled his sluggish body into her arms. “It never ends,” he answered. Whether that was them together in the water, or the trench, it was all mixed up together in the moment, and they clung to each other. He was soothed with the first rush of opiate warmth, but the steady motion of Charlotte's hand through his hair and down his back quieted him further. He pressed a kiss to her sternum, palmed her breast, and closed his heavy eyes. He found his lips moving in a flood of words pinned to disorganized thoughts and memories. He told her everything, confessed all: Anno, Helga, Köln, Ypres, Sambre, Berlin, what had happened in the moments before he pulled her to shore. "Hush," Charlotte whispered and kissed his face. He could die now and be more at peace than ever before._

"Do I?" Gereon asked, resigned. He couldn't muster anger or resentment. "I’ve never thought about what I need, only what I wanted. And about being wanted." 

He watched Helga untie the ribbons of her bed jacket and leave it on the counterpane. She crossed the room and came to him. Gereon stiffened, sighing unhappily when she pressed her body to his back, her face between his shoulder blades, her breath warm. He could feel her unbuttoning her nightdress, and in the quiet of the room, heard it fall. Her arms came around his waist. His body didn't respond. He exhaled a sound of frustration, exasperation, relief. 

"What does she give you that I can’t?" Helga pleaded softly, sounding like a girl again. "I can learn to do the filthy things she does. Tell me what to do to please you, Gereon."

_"Hold my hand," Charlotte chided._

_"Why?" He laughed, steering her around the corner onto Ku'damm toward Kakadu, his arm low around her waist, hand possessively on her hip._

_"Because I like it when you do."_

Gereon turned in Helga's arms. Hands on her bare shoulders, he gently pushed her away with a kiss to her forehead. It was the best he could do when anything he did would likely hurt her. He bent to pick up her nightdress, summoning the will not to steal a look at her full, round breasts, broad hips, or the curve of her waist still trained from years of corsetry. She smelled of talc and rose and lily of the valley. He forced himself to remember the first time he came to her bed, a year or more after he returned from France: tentative touches that she rebuffed, her reluctance toward anything but penetration, grief. Gereon couldn't finish. Helga cried afterwards. As he gently helped her into her gown, she began to cry again. The lump returned to his throat and he let it, heard the words tumble forth:

"Charlotte sees me, Helga. For what I am, and who I am today. Who I am when I’m with her. You want me to be Anno. You always have."

Helga shook her head vehemently, clutching at him when he turned away. He resisted.

"You wanted Anno to be there when Moritz came and he couldn’t be. But I was, and you let me believe you would have chosen me if things were different. But you wouldn't have, and then you didn’t. And then I came home and Anno didn’t. So I had to be the man you wanted Anno to be. And that man wasn’t who Anno was, or is. But there was never anyone else, Helga. For you or for me. Until Berlin." 

"Until Charlotte. _Jeder einmal in Berlin_ ," Helga whispered, touching her lips. She wiped her eyes on the back of her hand. "And what are you to her?"

"Just a man. Who sees her too. Who doesn’t want to buy her company. Who doesn’t see Kinder, Küche, Kirche, Kaiser when he looks at her. Go back to Köln, Helga. Your life is there. There’s nothing for you here. Not anymore." Gereon did his best to say it gently. He watched her return to bed, moving as if she were old.

"You love her," Helga said, drawing the sheet and counterpane up to her chin. She looked at him as if he were a stranger. 

Gereon didn't know. Whether he loved Charlotte wasn't a thought he allowed himself, but examining it now, he found it was likely true, and that it had been that way for some time, since long before he thought he'd lost her. He shrugged and sighed and walked to the wardrobe where he stripped off his pajamas, his nakedness brief with none of the luxury that he'd come to find in it. With Charlotte. He tugged on clean shorts and vest, socks and garters, fresh shirt and tie, and the grey suit he'd worn the day before. He could do with a shave, but had bathed earlier and would be fine tomorrow without one, even if the worse for wear. He couldn't go to Spenerstraße without calling, and felt too fragile to burden Charlotte after what she'd helped him through only days before. It was too late for Nassen Dreieck, too early for Kakadu, and he was too sad to drink just yet. He looked like shit, and it was just as well since he planned to sleep in the office. He bent to tie his brogues and put on his topcoat and hat. Maybe a walk. All the way to Charlottenburg.

"Where are you going?" Helga asked.

“Out. Away.” Gereon closed the door behind him and hurried through the hof and vorderhaus out to Luisenufer.


End file.
